Gabor Mate - under const

Here is what I wrote in April 2014

I just found out about ths guy Gabor Mate.

He sounds very interesting.

I am listening to a talk he gave about how capitalism and our western/American style culture makes us sick or crazy.

here are two links

http://www.radioproject.org/2012/02/gabor-mate-illness-addiction/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaAJQR_9Dg8

they seem to be the same talk.

what he says makes a lot of sense.

(i found him from the ipowerproject site)

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Here is part of what he says


“Proximal Separation is when a parent is physically there but emotionally unavailable, because they're too stressed and too distracted. That's what my children experienced when they were small because I was a workaholic physician, and this society rewards workaholism.

They tell you what a great guy you are, they reward you for the very things that undermine the health of your family, and for a lot of people it’s not even a question of a choice.” “

So even if you don't abuse kids in this country, if you just follow the parenting practices recommended by the so-called ‘experts’ you’re going to screw up your kids tremendously.”

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Update March 2016 - He also quotes from Louis Menand who said: “It’s all in your head” has the same appeal as “It’s all in the genes”: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are." More below

 
From New Yorker - Lous Menand

"Psychology in the nineteen-fifties played the role for many people that genetics does today. “It’s all in your head” has the same appeal as “It’s all in the genes”: an explanation for the way things are that does not threaten the way things are.Why should someone feel unhappy or engage in antisocial behavior when that person is living in the freest and most prosperous nation on earth? It can’t be the system! There must be a flaw in the wiring somewhere. So the postwar years were a slack time for political activism and a boom time for psychiatry. The National Institute of Mental Health, founded in 1946, became the fastest-growing of the seven divisions of the National Institutes of Health, awarding psychologists grants to study problems like alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and television violence. Ego psychology, a therapy aimed at helping people adapt and adjust, was the dominant school in American psychoanalysis. By 1955, half of the hospital beds in the United States were occupied by patients diagnosed as mentally ill."

"The belief that deviance and dissent could be “cured” by a little psychiatric social work (“This boy don’t need a judge—he needs an analyst’s care!”) is consistent with our retrospective sense of the nineteen-fifties as an age of conformity. The darker version—argued, for example, by Eli Zaretsky in his valuable cultural history of psychoanalysis, “Secrets of the Soul”—is that psychiatry became one of the instruments of soft coercion which liberal societies use to keep their citizens in line."

tags anti-psychiatry, Gabor Mate